Alcoholics
Anonymous is 25 years old this year. Yet it still
cannot altogether explain its remarkable success in rehabilitating
hopeless drunks. Some years ago A.A. asked some prominent
doctors
to explain its program to a group at the New York Academy
of
Medicine. To a man, the doctors hastily declined, although
each of
them was an enthusiastic supporter of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Suprised, A.A. wanted to know the reason for the brusque
refusals.

"We
do recognize most of the forces at work in A.A.," the
doctors said in substance, "but we cannot explain the
speed of the
results. A.A. accomplishes things in weeks or months which
ordinarily should take years. On top of that, tremendous
changes
follow in the personality of the alcoholic. There is something
at
work here that we don't understand. We call it the X factor.
You
call it God. Well, you can't explain God and neither can
we; at
least not at the New York Academy of Medicine."

A.A.
means many things to many men and women, but it works -
if an alcoholic genuinely wants it to work. And that, of
course,
is all A.A. needs to know. Thus has A.A. come of age, both
statistically, in its more than 8,500 groups in approximately
82
countries, and in its working philosophy. It has salvaged
at least
300,000 wrecked and sodden lives.

A.A.
inevitably made mistakes in its early days, and lives
were doubtless lost because of them. It was hard for the
early
members of A.A. to recognize what it was that was keeping
them
sober. Suddenly they realized that they were men and women
who not
only had discovered their inability to control alcohol,
but had
admitted to themselves that they were unable to control
it. It was
a vital realization.

Although
Bill W., a New York stockbroker, along with an
alcoholic physician, Doctor Bob, of Akron, Ohio, founded
A.A., no
one invented it. It just grew. And the process was one of
bitter
trial and painful error.

Early
in its history, A.A. discovered that one of the fastest
ways to get a sober alcoholic drunk again is to generate
guilt and
rebellion in him by demanding virtually unattainable standards
of
behavior. Today, no one demands anything of anyone in A.A.
There
are no rules whatever. There is nothing in the entire program
any
stronger than 12 suggested steps to sobriety.

The
futility of trying to force an alcoholic into sobriety
was learned in another way from a New York physician, Dr.
William
D. Silkworth, known affectionately as "the little doctor
who loved
drunks." It was estimated that Dr. Silkworth had salvaged
some
30,000 alcoholics. After Bill W. had vainly spent six discouraging
months in trying to sober up his first drunk, it was Dr.
Silkworth
who spotted the trouble.

"Stop
preaching," he said. "That won't work. Instead,
give
them the brutal medical facts about their obsession with
alcohol
and their physical incapability of handling it. The medical
facts
alone are enough to frighten anyone. Then maybe you can
soften
them up enough to make them want to do anything to get well.
That
is when A.A. is most likely to succeed."

Dr.
Silkworth was right. Every alcoholic is emotionally
unstable. Defiance and resentment against society are among
his
characteristics.

It
is still a medical mystery why one person should be abie
to tolerate alcohol and another should not. Although the
early
A.A.'s had much to learn from both medicine and religion,
they
were also realizing that it takes an alcoholic to help another
alcoholic. "Fellowship" became an extremely important
word in
A.A., along with "humility" and "sacrifice,"
all of them qualities
that a troubled world does not seem to be able to assume
as well
as some 300,000 drunks have been able to do.

Will
power alone, it quickly appeared, was not enough to keep
an alcoholic sober. Whatever it was called, there had to
be a
stronger force, a higher power to be accepted by, but not
forced
upon, the alcoholic. Strength from God was vital, but the
idea of
God had to be strictly an individual matter.

A.A.
readily accepted the fact that alcoholism is an illness
which cannot be cured but can only be arrested. Its byword
became: "Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic."
It emphasized that it is
the first drink that does the total damage, not the 10th
or 12th.
Switching drinks was certainly no answer, a grievous error
made by
a group of A.A.'s in Richmond, Va., who experimented briefly
with
beer instead of hard liquor, with disastrous results.

A.A.
quickly learned that long term pledges of sobriety were
meaningless in the case of an alcoholic. With too difficult
a
goal, it was inevitable that he would fall off the wagon
at some
point. So the "24-hour plan" was developed to
keep the
alcoholic's goal within his reach. Here was a simple but
powerful
bit of psychology which suggested that the alcoholic relax
and
merely concentrate on staying sober for 24 hours. "If
I feel the
urge to take a drink," he could tell himself, "I
will neither
yield to the temptation nor resist it. I will just put off
taking
the drink until tomorrow." By this happy quirk of time,
tomorrow
never comes. It is always today, a day of sobriety.

Along
with the personal problems of the alcoholic grappled
with within A.A., there were critical group problems to
be
resolved. Was there, for example, a real need for anonymity?

This
was a sticky problem indeed. Certainly there was a
crying need for publicity to call attention to A.A. and
install
public confidence in it. But when a A.A. group in Cleveland
sobered up a famous major-league baseball player and revealed
his
identity, the newspaper stories were sensational. Bill W.
decided
that personal anonymity was absolutely essential.

Many
alcoholics desperately wanted the assurance of anonymity
because of the social stigma which was then much greater
than it
is now. Other members, however, became so enthusiastic over
their
success with A.A. that they were trumpeting its praises
from the
rooftops. They could do a great deal of harm should they
slip,
however briefly, and get drunk again in public, as more
than a few
did.

At
the core of every group's survival lay the need for
absolute humility and equality on the part of the members.
So a
firm policy of principle before personality was adopted.

A.A.
decided early not to accept outside contributions but
instead to pay its own way through profits from its several
publications and by passing the hat at meetings. In the
end, A.A.
concluded that it had no need for large sums of money. It
needed
no temples.

A.A.
has had to guard constantly against becoming a
commercial enterprise in which material values might challenge
the
spiritual values on which A.A. was founded. In the face
of
countless tempting offers of outside financial help, A.A.
took the
vow of poverty, restricting even its own members to $100
in
contributions in any one year.

A.A.
saw at the outset the wisdom of never engaging in public
controversy. Such a decision might have saved the Washingtonian
society, a movement among alcoholics in Baltimore 100 years
ago.
At first, the Washingtonians saw themselves simply as alcoholics
trying to help one another, and at one point their total
membership exceeded 100,000. Then their egos took command,
and
they made a series of disastrous mistakes by associating
themselves with various reform groups, by taking violent
sides on
the explosive question of abolition, and to cap it all,
by taking
it upon themselves to reform America's drinking habits.

That
was the end of the Washingtonians. Their unity was lost
for good. A.A. learned the lesson well. From the beginning
it has
tried to be neither a debating society nor a temperance
society.
It is concerned with no problem other than its own.

Many
early A.A. groups made a whopper of a mistake on the
simple question of membership. For all their high principles,
they
were amazingly intolerant in their initial determination
to
restrict membership only to "pure" or "qualified"
alcoholics.
Convicts, alcoholic inmates in mental institutions, drug
addicts
who were also alcoholics: all these had to be shunned.

Looking
back, one can see why they tried to errect barriers.
The early A.A.'s were afraid. They were grimly trying to
keep
their lives and their homes intact in the face of tremendous
personal pressures, and wide open membership frightened
them.
Gradually, however, as their confidence increased, they
began to
realize that, of all groups, A.A. had no right to take away
an
alcoholic's last chance. Instead, it was A.A. which had
to give
him his last chance. One by one, the various groups abandoned
all
membership restrictions until the one requirement for membership
was a simple desire to stop drinking.

That
decision took A.A. into places it might otherwise never
have penetrated. Beginning with San Quentin, in California,
A.A.
groups have established themselves in more than 400 prisons,
and
there are now A.A. groups in almost 350 mental hospitals.

The
results have been genuinely spectacular. Whereas only 20%
of the alcoholics paroled from prisons and hospitals used
to make
the grade on the outside, more than 80% now find permanent
freedom
as members of A.A.

The
importance of A.A. in industry is also being increasingly
appreciated. Not long ago, absenteeism among known alcoholics
in
American industry was estimated by the Yale University Center
of
Alcohol Studies at 22 days a year: almost a full work month.
The
total loss to industry was more than $1 billion annually.
Many
company officials are now being urged to watch for the telltale
sign of the Monday morning absence, followed by the Tuesday
hangover, and to do something about it.

At
DuPont, the alcoholic employee is urged to visit the
company doctor, who in turn recommends A.A. (one A.A. member
is on
Du Ponts home medical staff in Wilmington, Del., and helps
start
A.A. groups in other Du Pont communities). Eastman Kodak
has
spearheaded a community program in Rochester, N.Y., which
involves
the closest kind of cooperation between doctors, law-enforcement
officials, social agencies, and Alcoholics Anonymous. North
American Aviation Inc., Allis-Chalmers, and scores of other
companies have initiated comparable programs.

There
will always be alcoholics who won't admit it and are
therefore tragically unreachable. And there will always
be A.A.
members who do admit it and then slip back to the bottle
anyway.
As Co-founder Bill W. once said in comparing those alcoholics
who
catch themselves in time and who don't, "There is a
saying that
there are 'high-bottom' drunks and 'low-bottom' drunks.

"Both
are lying in the gutter, but the high-bottom drunk has
his head on the curb. We A.A.'s are all drunks. If you think
you
are one we invite you to join us."